HN Explorer

Show HN: I've updated my food delivery repo. Feedback Welcome (github.com)

43 points by Abee_09 ↗ HN
Hey everyone! Over the past few years, I've dedicated my time to crafting a customizable solution for food delivery management. Now, I'm excited to showcase the culmination of all my work. Throughout the development journey, I've successfully incorporated all the planned features and even expanded upon them based on valuable feedback from the community.

My methodology has consistently involved seeking input from platforms like Reddit and forums, where I engage with like-minded individuals. Some of the recent enhancements stem directly from this collaborative feedback, and I'm eager to gather more insights on the latest update to the project.

Designed with a focus on individuals or businesses looking to start their own food delivery services, this solution simplifies the process of adding vendors, managing food items, coordinating deliveries, and overseeing riders. Beyond these core functionalities, you'll find a bunch of other features, including order tracking, real-time notifications, and more.

Since I don’t have a substantial team backing me, I truly appreciate any assistance you can offer. Every form of contribution is valued.

Give it a star and share your thoughts in the comments section. Your support means the world to me!

33 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 73.7 ms ] thread
quickthrower2
Well done on the hard work.

I am trying to get my head around why set up one of these businesses when Uber, Doordash exist, and it is a network effects game, where you need the most drivers to be trusted, the drivers need to see you as worthwhile as do the customers and the restaurants. So it is not just chicken/egg but maybe hen/rooster/egg problem.

Unless your plan is selling to the well funded startups who reckon they can muscle in?

What might make a bit more sense is if this is used by the restaurant who employ their own riders, but that is a dying breed I reckon.

diggan
Seems people are using the platform to setup delivery of other things than just food. From the case studies:

- Order hair and nail care services - https://enatega.com/stylizenow/

- Campus food delivery - https://enatega.com/easy-eats/ (this one is kind of just tiny bit different from normal food delivery though...)

- Wine delivery - https://enatega.com/vinifynd/

With that, I guess it kind of makes sense.

infecto
Realistically I don't think anyone is truly paying for this code base though.
dagurp
Uber and Doordash don't exist everywhere though
bongodongobob
Sure, but not because of technical reasons though. This won't solve that.
diggan
It kind of does though. The bigger food delivery companies like Uber don't seem to be interested in smaller markets with strong worker and consumer protections, but local companies could still be interested to do something similar as they usually already follow local regulations and customs.
bongodongobob
In my experience, the places that don't have delivery services are rural and just don't have the population for it to make sense.
KomoD
There are other equivalents

Foodora, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, Lieferando, Deliveroo, SkipTheDishes, iFood, Zomato and so on

dagurp
None of them exist in my country but we do have Wolt. I'm sure there are plenty of places around the world that don't have any service like this.
djbusby
Don't need all that. Think smaller communities. Eg: my neighborhood can use this to schedule grocery with a smaller group. The trust is there and there is no need to attract drivers. So this big shared menu means only one person goes to Market Basket and buys lots of stuff. Then we all just walk over to Steve's to get our groceries.
gumballindie
People are desperately trying to move away from such platforms. Nearly all products i ordered had a flier in the box with a seller’s website and some kind of incentive. For food for instance, i received an offer of two pizzas for one if i order using the shop’s app. Naturally, i started using it.
infecto
Maybe as a POS system but are many people really moving away from it in terms of delivery? Seems like the pivot has been the delivery services offer white label experience. For example the same day walmart deliveries are done with one of the major delivery apps but you as the customer never see that. I don't think most local business want to get into or back into delivering themselves.
gumballindie
While it may be convenient for walmart and large chains to leverage delivery companies’ infrastructure, for consumers and small businesses it is not. Nor is it for the economy at large. Whenever i discuss the topic with a small business owner their eyes lit up. I am fortunate to live in an area where community is still a thing and you can sense the strong desire to move away from the status quo.
infecto
You must not have spoken to enough business owners then. It makes no sense from an economic perspective for a restaurant to run their own delivery service. It can definitely work in some markets but especially post pandemic the economics would really cut margins thin. I generally don't even like the gig economy because I think so far it has supressed wages from the gig worker but I still think it has merit. I suspect most delivery drivers would financially do better through the larger delivery players than working for a single restaurant too.
dublinben
Beyond that, it’s not even clear that it’s possible to make money doing this. The major players all lose money, and they have years of traction built up.

This might be interesting from a technical perspective, but it’s unlikely that there’s a viable business model here.

Abee_09
Uber and Doordash exist yes, but they are not available everywhere around the world. The solution is particularly targeting countries and regions where such solutions have not been employed or to improve upon ones that exist in those regions.

As another commenter pointed out, this solution can also be used for other use cases apart from just food delivery, like wine delivery and at-home hairdressing appointments.

Lastly, we have a one time fee for the backend and we give out the source code as well. Almost every other solution is operating as saas, so this gives companies the choice to have their own food delivery management system like Ubereats without making monthly payments and with full access to the back-end so that they can customize it as much as they like.

friendly_chap
> Our solution is open source but the backend and API are proprietary, and can be obtained via paid license.

So not open source at all then. You can't even "not open source" the frontend anyway (maybe minify and obfuscate).

hasty_pudding
Does this coincide with an app the driver installs on their phone?
lopis
I was wondering the same. Even some currently live offers in some cities suffer from the lack of riders available. The only way such a system could succeed, IMO, is if the riders can install a single app and use all the white-labeled services in a single app.
Abee_09
I'm not sure i fully grasp what you mean by the question but there is a separate app for riders included with the platform.
Brajeshwar
FYI, the disclaimer, “The frontend source code for our solution is completely open source. However, the API and backend is proprietary and can be accessed via a paid license.”
contravariant
Is it even open source at that point? Sure you can customize the front-end, but is that not standard for food delivery solutions at this point?

The interesting part is the API and the back-end. Making the API proprietary is especially damning, it doesn't just prevent someone from hosting it themselves it prevent someone from interoperating with it. You could of course reverse engineer the API, which is why I don't quite understand the need to keep it proprietary, but having some certainty that things will simply work would be nice.

spenserhale
I applaud your effort. To give you some constructive criticism, here is some feedback.

I went to the GitHub page, and on the direct link you shared, there are multiple broken images in the readme—the demo video, technology logos, etc. It is a glaring miss that within the first content of the page is a broken video. It shows a lack of attention to detail, even large details.

Next, I looked to see if there are tests/test suites for the project, as it lists working with a dozen different technologies, and I did not find one. Those dependencies will eventually have breaking changes, and with the numerous interconnected front-ends, bugs are just waiting to happen without tests.

I was curious about your license fee and navigated to the Enatega website, which is very slow. It took more than five seconds to generate the HTML page. Web best practices are the largest paint of your website. It should happen in less than two seconds, and five is off the charts.

I was curious if your company's website, Ninjascode, was any better, but it was even worse. It took 35 seconds for the server to send the HTML page.

You will lose customers because people will not spend thousands of dollars to license and trust software when the creators cannot serve a good experience on the marketing sites and don't QA their work.

That would be my overall advice: there needs to be more attention to detail. And then secondly, forming a plan to keep software error-prone as the tech stack and code changes over time.

Anon1096
Also, looking at the code, there's .DS_STORE and .expo right at the root level, and then the individual frontends have template readmes from the starter guides they were made with. I think customers likely won't look, but if they do, it's not a great impression for code quality. (And then taking a closer look, lack of testing etc is definitely worrying)
Abee_09
Thank you for taking the time and giving your feedback. I appreciate it, truly.

So for most of the issues like broken images and the website being slow; our hosting server was not equipped at the time to handle a massive influx of users on the site which was what happened at the time that you would have opened it as well. (We were not expecting that much traffic to be generated from this post but yeah we should have been better prepared). The server's been upgraded now and the site should be much faster now.

I would also like to point out that we are actively working on a lot of the components for the solution, as well as the website so we know that a lot of improvements are still to be made.

amadeuspagel
Is this shopify for restaurants? Is there a hosted version available?
quickthrower2
I think it is shopify for food delivery middlemen (or local communities of restaurants).
sagaro
There are two ways to do a delivery on demand (like quick commerce or food delivery): 1. Take responsibility for the delivery. Here is a customer orders and a Restaurant accepts and prepares the food, you take the responsibility to find a rider and get it delivered. If there are no riders, it is not simple to cancel the order, as the restaurant has prepared the food. In this case, you have to take the hit on the delivery fee (surge price it) and pay out of your pocket. 2. Don't take responsibility of the delivery. Here when a customer orders and there is no delivery guy, the restaurant takes the customers money as they have prepared the food. The customer is pissed and the app will slowly die.
KomoD
> Our solution is open source but the backend and API are proprietary, and can be obtained via paid license.

This should be changed in my opinion, I wouldn't say "our solution is open source" when the backend and api aren't.

And the "enatega" site is slow (same with the ninjascode site) and broken, sometimes it loads, sometimes it gives a Database error

The twitter account linked on the Github org is also suspended so that should probably be removed

DeathArrow
>Our solution is open source but the backend and API are proprietary, and can be obtained via paid license.

So what's exactly open source?